Award-winning novelist, screenwriter and playwright Bill Mesce, Jr. turns, for the first time, to short fiction in a gallery of pieces ranging from the familiar (an encounter at a winter-whipped commuter bus stop in North ) to the arcane (a lost cavalry patrol in the Civil War-set Precis ); the sweet (a hopeful tete a tete at Parisian cafe in Ad Vivum ) to the bittersweet (a drifter marking time between busses in Ante Meridiem ); the intimate (an altar boy’s private rebellion in Crusade ) to the epic (the Vietnam War novella, Diamond Red . Mesce’s stunning first collection of short fiction grafts sharp images onto a landscape filled with compelling characters, characters who laugh and love and ache. His stories carry and a sense of immediacy, the truth of experience.